


What Lies Beneath

by cordeliadelayne



Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Crimes & Criminals, Drama, Gen, Ghosts, Modern slavery, no spoilers for false value, policing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-04
Updated: 2020-05-04
Packaged: 2021-03-02 23:29:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24005128
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cordeliadelayne/pseuds/cordeliadelayne
Summary: Peter and Nightingale are called on to assist in a case of modern slavery.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 76





	What Lies Beneath

**Author's Note:**

  * For [seraphina_snape](https://archiveofourown.org/users/seraphina_snape/gifts).



> Written as a Christmas present for the lovely and very patient seraphina_snape. Set vaguely after Lies Sleeping, no spoilers for False Value.

When I turned up at the Folly one morning to find a uniform sitting at the kitchen table, I was surprised to find that Molly was nowhere in sight and Nightingale himself was making the tea and plating up some biscuits - I may have done a quick sweep of the room before I came inside just in case it was a hostage situation.

Nightingale motioned me inside and took out what had been my designated mug since I'd first moved in and poured me some tea.

“Peter, this is Constable Carter. He's new at Belgravia. He has a case he thinks might be of interest to us.”

Intrigued I sat down, glad for the moment of a break from Latin declension and took out my notepad and pen.

“Why don't we start from the beginning?” Nightingale suggested.

“Right, sir, yes, sir,” Carter said, sitting up ramrod straight. Nightingale has that effect on some people.

“We had this woman come into the station last week. Lydia Ayande, 31, IC3. She was claiming she'd been held in a flat at Albert Hall Mansions. Said she'd got this job as a live-in carer for this old woman and her sister, only they wouldn't pay her proper wages and kept her locked up in a bedroom, used to beat her when she answered back, all the usual, until she managed to escape.” Carter took a sip of tea while Nightingale nodded encouragingly for him to continue. “It looked like your typical case of modern slavery, and you know how hot the Home Office is on that at the moment, what with her being, you know...”

He didn't point at me, but he may as well have done.

“But of course you needed to verify her story,” Nightingale prompted.

“Right, yeah. So we interviewed Lydia Ayande and got a description of the people she claimed to be living with, description of the flat, and get her to draw out a plan of the room and the layout, that kind of thing.”

I was impressed, even more so when he pushed his notebook across the table so I could copy out the plan.

“And it all checked out?” I asked.

“Exactly as she said. We checked all the details then I went round with the sergeant to have a little informal chat with the occupants and they were the spitting image of Lydia Ayande's description. They were a bit confused when we showed them a picture of her, claimed they'd never seen her before but they were happy to let us have a look around the bedroom and it was almost exactly the same as she'd said.”

“Almost?” I asked.

“No bed in there any more, but marks on the carpet where there would have been one, and the curtains were black, not blue, but the general layout was the same. I marked the differences in my book.”

I nodded appreciatively, he'd even made out a little key with corresponding symbols.

“The governor went in and had a word and Forensics came out to have a look but there was nothing linking Lydia Ayande to that flat. And the occupants – Jane Troy and Annie Troy - had no previous involvement with the police.”

“Interesting as this is,” Nightingale said, “I'm not quite sure how this falls into the Folly's purview.”

“Right. So I thought I'd go back and have another talk with Lydia Ayande.” He paused and took a sip of tea. “That's when she told me she'd lied. She'd never set foot in that flat in her life.”

“So how did she know about it?” I asked.

“She said she got the information from the real woman who'd been kept there. Or – rather – from her ghost.”

Nightingale and I exchanged a look. Yes, definitely one for us.

We thanked Carter and told him we'd take it from there. He seemed visibly relieved and I could well imagine the stories he'd heard about us; I was impressed he'd managed to say the g-word with a straight face.

We alighted to the study with a plate of Molly's newest experiment – cheese and chilli scones. Not quite hot enough for me and possibly not quite hot enough for Nightingale either.

“I'll double check with the neighbourhood team, see if they've had any run-ins with the Troys,” I suggested, “but we'll need to talk to Lydia Ayande ourselves, find out exactly where she came into contact with the ghost.”

Nightingale nodded. “It might make a good exercise for Abigail, given her ghost hunting successes of late.”

I probably failed to keep my sigh to myself, but Abigail had been having a quite frankly alarming success rate when it came to discovering the whereabouts of the recently and not so recently departed, so much so that we were beginning to get a reputation as a lost and found souls office. I got the impression that it reminded Nightingale of the good old days when the Folly had a couple of wizards solely dedicated to missing persons but it wasn't very high on my list of things to ask him about.

* * * * *

The next day I headed over to Lydia Ayande's flat with Sahra Guleed. We'd already done our due diligence and knew that she lived alone in a flat overlooking West Kensington Tube Station and didn't seem to have any appreciable income of her own.

“Independently wealthy,” Sahra had asked, “or suspicious?”

“Usually both,” I'd replied.

We arrived just in time to greet Ayande on her way out. She was wearing a long red weave held in place by a yellow scarf, white trimmed sunglasses and a knee length fur coat. Not at all the impression I'd got from Constable Carter. She also seemed completely unphased when we showed her our warrant cards, though did fuss a little when we asked to talk to her inside her flat.

“I was just on my way out.”

“This won't take a moment,” Sahra said, keeping her stance loose in case Ayande decided to make a run for it.

“Fine. But you're wasting your time. You always do.”

The flat was neatly furnished with books everywhere, piled onto tables and bookcases and lying haphazardly on the floor creating a fire officer's nightmare. As always I drifted towards them to take a look while Sahra accepted an offer of coffee for the both of us from a complicated looking coffee machine.

“I suppose you're here about the old women?” she asked.

“That's right,” Sahra said when it became clear that I was too distracted by some of the titles on display to pay her any proper attention. “We'd just like to clarify some details.”

I ran my fingers along a couple of the spines and heard Ayande twitch behind me. “Do you mind?” she asked.

Sahra had been half way to sitting down when I turned around and she straightened up as soon as she saw the look on my face.

“That's an interesting collection of books you have.”

Ayande's gaze darted towards the nearest door but before she could make up her mind I was moving to block her exit and Sahra was coming up behind her. After a tense second she visibly deflated, threw her sunglasses onto the nearest coffee table and then threw herself down onto the sofa.

“Fine, I suppose the other one told you I see dead people. So what? It's not a crime.”

“And that's how you knew about the Troys, because a ghost told you?”

“Hang on,” she said, sitting up and twisting around to look at me. “You believe me?”

“I believe a lot of things,” I told her.

“But – you're police.” She said it with the conviction of a woman who'd not been taken seriously by any one in authority for a long time.

“There's lots of different police.”

“It's true, then?” she asked. “My grandmother was right? About the wizard policeman?”

Sahra quickly stepped away to deal with the coffee machine. She says that deferring to me on magical matters just makes practical sense, but really I think she just doesn't want to have to deal with the doubling of paperwork.

“What did your grandmother tell you exactly?”

“She said there was a house somewhere in London where a wizard policeman lived. It's not you is it?”

“No. She'd have been talking about my boss. Is your grandmother...”

Ayande shook her head. “Hers was the first ghost I saw. After that, I kind of just kept seeing them. Not everyday, but enough. When I was little I didn't know how to use it – how to help – but as I got older I knew what I had to do.”

“So you go to the police and pretend to be a victim of a crime?” I asked, nodding my thanks to Sahra as she handed me a perfectly made latte.

“I grew up in Birmingham,” she explained. “I tried telling a policemen there I knew about a murder because a ghost told me. Thought he'd give himself an aneurysm the way he was laughing. I just decided this was better.”

Sahra had disappeared into what I assumed was one of the bedrooms to have a look around so I moved to sit next to Ayande and keep her preoccupied.

“The Troys then, what did your ghost tell you about them?”

“She said her name was Andrea. They don't always remember. The Troys kept her as a slave during the '90s till they had a falling out and one of them pushed her down the stairs. Broke her neck.”

“What did they do with the body?”

“Workmen had been doing repairs to the road, the whole area was a mess of holes and trenches. They put her in there with the others.”

“Others?”

“I counted four, but there might have been more. All with a different fashion sense, if you get me?”

“And when did you first see Andrea?” I asked.

Ayande shifted in her seat, considering. “A few weeks ago maybe? I was at a concert at the Albert Hall and I just bumped into her – or through her really, on my way home. Usually they stick close to where they died.”

“This concert?” Sahra asked, coming back into the room and holding up a ticket stub that looked like it had been pinned to a noticeboard. “Because that was last year.”

“No, a different one,” Ayande said, but her expression had turned calculating for a beat too long.

“There's got to be half a mill's worth of stuff in there,” Sahra said to me, “furs, jewels, watches, laptops. Most of them are still in the original packaging.”

Ayande wrapped her coat around herself and smiled. “I don't know what you mean.”

“Blackmail is a serious offence,” Sahra said.

“Prove it.”

* * * * *

We arrested her of course but on her solicitor's advice she refused to cooperate any more. Still, the Troys being victims of blackmail would be a good way of getting in to see them and do a Falcon assessment.

Nightingale had been watching the interview and suggested we strike while the iron was hot and move on to the Troys straight away.

Sahra was leaning up against her car waiting for us as we arrived. Opposite the Albert Hall and Kensington Gardens, the Mansions date from the 1880s, originally intended to be a large row of houses and then designed as a large block of flats, one of the first flats for your upper middle class man about town and worlds away from my manor. Rising up to seven floors – the Troys had flats on the fifth and sixth floors – they had sash and casement windows, Queen Anne style red brick and an average asking price upwards of seven figures.

“They went in about twenty minutes ago,” Sahra told us.

“How do you want to do this?” I asked.

Nightingale nodded towards the back door. “You two take the front, I'll stay at the back. There might...”

I never did find out what he was going to say. Instead we watched as a shadowy form began to gather a little more substance and then another, and then another until there were ten ghosts flickering in and out of existence.

“Sahra, call Forensics,” Nightingale said. “Peter, lets have a word with the locals.”

We walked nonchalantly over to the gathering of ghosts and once Nightingale nodded to me I made a werelight and stuck it to the wall of the Mansions. Immediately the ghosts fanned around it holding their hands out as if warning themselves against a roaring fire.

“Ladies,” Nightingale began, “if we could trouble you for a moment of your time?”

The ghosts ignored him at first which he and I were expecting until Nightingale drifted a stronger werelight above their heads and made it disappear with an audible pop.

“What?” one of the ghosts, a woman with an impressive '70s Afro, demanded though the effect was lessened as she flickered each time she moved away from my werelight.

“We were just wondering if you could tell us how you found yourselves here?”

The woman sauntered over to Nightingale and put her hand out. He obliged by making a small werelight that she gobbled like chewing gum.

“You're going to stop them then?” she asked. “The mad witches.”

“Witches?” Nightingale asked, carefully – you can never assume these days that it's just a figure of speech.

“I'm down there,” she said, moving toward a slab of pavement that looked like it wouldn't take much to pull up. “They pushed me down the stairs when I told them I wanted to leave. No one came looking for me, in all this time.”

“And the others?” I asked as she started to fade away.

“Same story, more or less. You going to do them in?”

“They'll be dealt with,” Nightingale assured her grimly.

“'Bout bloody time,” she said as she drifted away completely.

“We'll need names, dates of death, as much as they can remember. I can't imagine any of them were given proper contracts or paid taxes so missing persons reports may be our best source of information.”

I was already making notes and rough sketches of the ghosts' appearance when the main door to the block of flats opened and a small woman with greying hair who looked like she couldn't lift a shopping bag, never mind push someone down the stairs, peered out at us owlishly from glasses two sizes too large.

I moved over first with Nightingale at a slower pace behind me, I had the impression he was staring up at the top floor window.

“We're from the Metropolitan Police,” I began, only to have the woman raise her hand imperiously in my face; if I hadn't been paying due attention I would have walked straight into it.

“I wish to speak to the engineer, not the oil rag,” she said to Nightingale who seemed to take rather longer to parse what she meant than I had.

“We'd both love a cup of tea, thank you,” he said, moving her aside easily as he entered the front door with me a quick step behind, just in case she decided to slam the door in my face.

She huffed a little but allowed us into the lift with her and then into the kitchen in her flat. She set out the best china for Nightingale and a rather damaged looking green mug for me. Nightingale and I sat down without being asked.

“You understand why we're here?” I asked her.

She turned her back on me and addressed her answer to Nightingale. “Of course I knew that little madam wouldn't keep her mouth shut, even when I paid her she still wanted more. Over a year this has been going on. It's not right but it's just like them. Always wanting something for nothing. And then to go to the police when I finally refused to keep paying her. You simply can't get reliable staff any more.”

“Murdering them seems a bit counter-productive then, doesn't it?” I asked.

She plonked my mug in front of me and the hot tea splashed about so much I had to move my notebook out of the way pretty sharpish.

“If people behaved as they should none of this would have happened. Ghosts? Honestly, who ever heard of such a thing.”

“So you knew...”

“That they're outside? Of course. My sister, she's touched. I suppose you both are as well, are you?”

“In a manner of speaking,” Nightingale replied before I could. “Your sister is upstairs I believe? Could you call her down?”

“What would be the point? She's not going to hear me.”

Something about the tone of her voice had Nightingale moving towards the stairs and taking them two at a time. I stayed with the elder Troy, who I noted was starting to look a bit peaky around the edges.

“What have you taken?” I asked her as she slumped further down in her chair.

“Don't – touch – me,” she panted as I tried to feel for a slowing pulse. I felt Nightingale's quick burst of magic several floors above my head but I couldn't make out what he was doing and besides I was too busy on the radio calling for Sahra and an ambulance. I lifted the lid of the tea pot and peered inside – whatever she'd been planning on feeding us definitely wasn't regular tea and I was glad neither of us had actually drunk any.

“Hanging,” Nightingale said as he came back into the room at a much calmer pace. “When I saw her at the window...” He trailed off, looking annoyed at himself. “I should have realised, she'd been like that probably since Constable Carter's visit.”

“We might save this one,” I said just as the banging on the door indicated the arrival of the paramedics. Nightingale went to answer it and we then moved out of the way – we wouldn't be much use for this part of the proceedings.

There was a slight glimmer in the street, perhaps the last sighting of our resident ghosts, and then everywhere seemed very empty.

“We should give them a decent burial,” Nightingale said, as he, Sahra and I leaned up against the car and watched the paramedics loading their ambulance. The elder Troy was still clinging to life, just.

“Do you think the Met's got that kind of budget?” Sahra asked.

“It won't be coming out of their budget,” Nightingale replied.

“I'll get some quotes, then,” Sahra offered, and Nightingale nodded gratefully, his eye still on the Mansions. I could tell what he was thinking – this had been going on for a long time, long enough that if he'd been paying more attention when it had started one of his mysterious contacts might have mentioned it to him. Or maybe they wouldn't have noticed either. You can go either way in London.

“At least they'll get some sense of justice now,” I said, though I was about as happy as he was that they'd likely not be seeing a day in court.

“Yes,” Nightingale said, “I suppose there is that.” He pushed himself away from the car. “I'll drive you over to Beverley's, if you like,” he said, “we can't do much here now until Forensics have finished.”

“You should stay for dinner. Bev won't mind. And – and there's something we've got to tell you.”

Nightingale looked politely interested but didn't ask any questions as he drove. Which was just as well because Bev had made me promise we'd tell him together.  



End file.
